Multi-Page Table of Contents: Why Pure TeX Primitives Beat tocloft Bugs

The Fragility of Third-Party TOC Packages

Many LaTeX book templates rely on tocloft or titletoc to customize the Table of Contents. While convenient for simple 1-page documents, these packages suffer from severe edge-case bugs in complex trade paperbacks:

1. Unbreakable Tables: Authors often resort to \begin{tabular*} to align page numbers, which cannot split across pages when a book has 15+ chapters and appendices.
2. Orphaned Part Headers: When a Part divider falls near the bottom of a TOC page, tocloft often leaves the Part title stranded as the last line without its subsequent chapters.
3. Baseline Misalignment: Multi-line chapter titles cause page numbers on the right to float in the vertical center rather than anchoring to the baseline of the final line.

The Pure TeX Engine in BookTemplatesPro

BookTemplatesPro avoids fragile external TOC packages by redefining LaTeX's native TOC primitives (\l@part and \l@chapter):

% 1. Custom Table of Contents Opening
\renewcommand{\tableofcontents}{%
  \cleardoublepage
  \thispagestyle{empty}%
  \vspace*{6mm}%
  \begin{center}%
    {\fontsize{13.5pt}{17.5pt}\selectfont\sansDemi\textls[220]{\contentsname}\par}%
  \end{center}%
  \vspace{5mm}\par
  \@starttoc{toc}%
  \clearpage
}

% 2. Anti-Orphan Part Headers
\renewcommand{\l@part}[2]{%
  \ifnum \c@tocdepth >-2\relax
    \Needspace{5\baselineskip}%
    \vskip 4.5mm \@plus1.5pt\relax
    {\centering \fontsize{8.5pt}{11pt}\selectfont\sansMedium\textls[180]{\MakeUppercase{#1}}\par}%
    \nobreak
    \vskip 2mm \@plus1pt\relax
    \@afterheading
  \fi
}

% 3. Baseline-Aligned Multi-Line Chapters
\renewcommand{\l@chapter}[2]{%
  \ifnum \c@tocdepth >\m@ne
    \vskip 2.2mm \@plus0.8pt\relax
    \begingroup
      \noindent\normalfont
      \def\numberline##1{\makebox[1.8em][l]{##1}}%
      \parbox[b]{\dimexpr\textwidth-2.8em\relax}{\raggedright #1}\hfill\makebox[2.2em][r]{#2}\par
    \endgroup
  \fi
}

### Key Benefits

• Zero Package Conflicts: Works seamlessly alongside titlesec, fancyhdr, and microtype.
• Automatic Page Splitting: Automatically flows over 2, 3, or 4 pages with identical typography.
• Baseline Pinning: \parbox[b] guarantees that the right-aligned page number aligns with the final baseline of wrapped titles.